preload
can take the values none
, metadata
or auto
. The default is auto
. It can be good to set it to none
on pages where you include multiple audio
elements, preventing the browser from downloading all the audio data.

Format support

Now, we’re not in a perfect world and you may want to provide multiple formats because mp3 is not an open format and therefore some browsers can’t support it. A free format, Ogg, would be great across the board, but it’s sadly not supported by all browsers. See here
for a list of browser format support. Use the source
element within the audio
element to provide different formats: